"Inequality at birth is neither just nor unjust. What's just and unjust is the way institutions deal with it" - John Rawls

"I always had a certain dislike for general principles and abstract prescriptions. I think it's necessary to have an "empirical lantern" or a "visit with the patient" before being able to understand what is wrong with him. It is crucial to understand the peculiarity, the specificity, and also the unusual aspects of the case" - Albert O. Hirschman

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In school education, when an expert points something as a constraint and offers a solution along those lines, ask yourself these questions

What is the background of the person — what is his/her area of expertise?

What is the constraint being pointed out and what’s the solution proposed?

In most cases, we find that, there is convergence between
answers to first and second questions. It means that
the answers could be in form of pairs such as

the person has expertise in pedagogy

the person identifies lack of appropriate pedagogy as the constraint and offers solution along those lines.

In other words, the problem identified by the person is same as the area of expertise of the person. This raises fundamental questions.

Did the person identify the problem as pedagogy because he/she is expert in that area and sees scope of improvement there? OR

Did the person consider all the existing constraints for analysis and then identify pedagogy as the constraint?

Without
knowing answer to these questions, we can’t ascertain whether the
person’s response is emanating from a systematic analysis or if it is
just a parochial world view.

Such
parochial world views have severe impacts on the discourse and policy
making because those parochial world views feed into the policy
discourse shaping the policy architecture of the governments. Constraints pointed by such parochial analysis may not be the real constraints. The person may be pointing these as constraints just because he/she happens to have experience in that. Such prescriptions crowd out the other important aspects, that may be the real constraints.

An important exercise that can be practiced during policy consultations is

Ask the area of expertise of the person. (Let’s say the person answers pedagogy/curriculum)

Ask — Do you think there is any other constraint more important than pedagogy?

This forces people to think out of their comfort zone.

Repeat
the question two several times. Suppose say, the person
says — governance, ask — what apart from governance and pedagogy is the
problem.

After the person identifies several aspects as constraints, ask — why didn’t you mention these earlier?

If
the answer is that the person either didn’t give much thought about
them or that the person doesn’t know about them in detail, hence didn’t
speak about it, then one needs to exercise severe caution about that person’s prescriptions.

The
unfortunate part is that people with such parochial views are adamant
about their views and refuse to see the world with any lens other than
those they are comfortable in.

Indian
education policy has historically been dominated by pedagogists and
moral value advocates. They have viewed education only through the
parochial lens of pedagogy ignoring the systemic aspects of governance
structures over which the pedagogical practices are mounted.

In fact, it has been a part of traditional discourse and common understanding that an expert in education means an expert in pedagogy.
When someone commented that the NEP committee doesn’t have
educationists, I asked — what does an educationist mean? The reply
was — someone who has taught children!

the
reform agenda being suggested by the quantitative research on the
economics of education is seeking to reform the “conventional” wisdom on
input -based policies, it is worth thinking about where this
conventional wisdom gets formed. At
present, it comes from Schools of Education (and related disciplines)
where there is a limited amount of quantitative training of students,
and where there is a greater emphasis on the history and philosophy of
education and of the role of education in shaping society.

Despite the mounting evidence
suggesting that even the pedagogical practices good in the `technical
know-how` are failing in the systems with weak capacity, some continue
to believe that pedagogy is the constraint and refuse to acknowledge
that ‘governance-capacity’ is the binding constraint. In fact, they even go
ahead and argue that ‘governance’ is NOT the binding constraint and that
the problem is ‘deeper’ hinting at pedagogy (which is against all
evidence available).

For
such people, anything other than reform in pedagogy is not
satisfactory. Of course, pedagogy is important. The issue is that even
with our limited knowledge, we can do a lot by just improving the
governance. In fact, the lack of appropriate pedagogy can be also traced
back to the systems of weak capacity. As Lant Pritchett argues

the issue is not the pedagogy. The issue is — why is that such problems have long not been identified and corrected?

The answer comes back to institutions-governance.

The
parochial world view of some, looking at the problem of education only
through the lens of pedagogy and the stubbornness to ignore other
critical issues, in fact arguing that other issues aren't critical, in the face of evidence will definitely cost us a lot
in the long-term.